Conducted 4-month participant/observation and 52 interviews with sixth and seventh graders. Identified six categories that students viewed as being their responsibilities for learning: doing work, obeying rules, paying attention, learning or studying, trying/making effort, and responsibility as something given or taken. (Author/NB)

This study followed 206 adolescent boys and their families from the fourth through eighth grade to test a model for conduct-related school failure. Results indicated that low parental academic achievement was associated with ineffective discipline practices and child antisocial behavior in the sixth grade and that ineffective discipline had a…

Two studies examined parent expectations and punishments of mature-faced children as compared to their baby-faced peers. Study 1 revealed that parents allocated more cognitively demanding chores to mature-faced 11 year olds depicted in photographs than to baby-faced children. Study 2 revealed that parents perceived misbehaviors of mature-faced…

Notes that, although literature on middle school teaching focuses on developmental stresses of young adolescents, it rarely offers specific ways to respond to student behaviors associated with these changes. Delineates the physical, cognitive, and social-emotional motivations behind typical early adolescent behaviors and then offers middle school…

Structural equation modeling analysis of 349 youths, aged 9-16, in St. Kitts, West Indies, showed that physical punishment by itself does make a modest, but significant, direct and negative contribution to youths' psychological adjustment. Children tended to experience themselves to be rejected in direct proportion to the frequency and severity of…

Teachers as Facilitators (TAF) program used teachers as leaders of small groups that promoted social, emotional, and academic development of children at high risk for substance abuse. Found that school personnel were capable of accurately identifying and referring students; TAF program was effective in improving students' perceived academic…

Fifth and sixth graders completed a sex role orientation measure, viewed a film portraying a child playing gender-appropriate games with members of the same sex or gender-inappropriate games with members of the opposite sex, and made judgments about the child. Subjects' judgments were influenced by the child's gender-related behaviors but not by…

Studied parent-child agreement on parenting behaviors and mediators of agreement for 134 families. Results revealed low degree of agreement between parents and children in reports of parenting behaviors. Differential levels of agreement between father-child and mother-child reports suggests that reports might be related to children's transition…

Discusses how adolescents are defining their need for "safe spaces" in ways useful to the current policy debate about community safety. It reveals adolescent's greater interest in preserving public spaces and youth programs and offers new insights into the causes of youth crime. Reasons for cooperative efforts to define and explore…

Role of self-efficacy beliefs as a mediator and moderator of the relation between the home environment and well-being was examined for both European American and African American adolescents. Found that self-efficacy beliefs sometimes mediate the relation between experiences in the home environment and measures of adolescent development. Effects…

Investigated the influence of parental attachment on the initiation of adolescent cigarette smoking. The two models tested each specify different causal ordering among the three variables of attachment to parents, commitment to conventional activities, and belief in the conventional rules of society. Findings indicated that parental attachment has…

Examined whether peer-rejected preadolescents differ from nonrejected groups (average, popular, neglected) in their explanations for peer-social events and their perceived control of outcomes. Found that rejected children were inclined to forego credit for acceptance, to ascribe rejection to persistent factors, and to perceive lower control of…

For 720 same-sex sibling pairs from 10 to 18 years of age, parents and adolescents provided information about family environment and adolescent adjustment. Found that adolescents' perceptions of their parents' conflict-negativity mediated the relationship between parental conflict-negativity and adolescent antisocial behavior. (BC)

A study of inhalant use among 87 American Indian boarding school students aged 10-18 found that inhalant use was negatively related to participation in traditional tribal activities for both males and females and was also related to measures of cognitive ability and cognitive egocentrism for males. (Contains 43 references.) (SV)

Describes the efforts, outcomes, and recommendations from an urban California school district's pilot program for vaccinating preteens in two diverse urban middle schools. Barriers and strategies included staff inexperience, educating students, informing parents, tracking vaccinations, coping with language diversity, and creating individualized…